Lost committee quorum thwarts vote on Senate anti-discrimination bill

BATON ROUGE -- A bill designed to prohibit state agencies from discriminating against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered workers was bottled up in a Senate committee today after the panel lost its quorum.

Sen. J.P. Morrell

Sen. J.P. Morrell, D-New Orleans, the chief sponsor of Senate Bill 211, asked that the bill be taken up at the next meeting of the Senate Committee on Labor and Industrial Relations, probably next Thursday. If it survives the committee, it may have trouble getting through the legislative process as lawmakers must end their annual session by June 23.

Only four of the seven committee members attended the meeting, and one of them, Sen. Danny Martiny, R-Kenner, had to leave to attend another meeting before the vote came up.

Morrell pointed out that past governors have issued executive orders banning discrimination in state jobs based on gender, sexual orientation, political expression and gender identification.

Officials from Gov. Bobby Jindal's office and the Louisiana Baptist Convention, the umbrella group for the Southern Baptist churches in the state, opposed Morrell's bill.

"A person's sexual orientation has nothing to do with job performance," said Mary Griggs of New Orleans, a proponent of the bill. "It is time for Louisiana public employers to be prohibited from discriminating" against gays, lesbians and others.

Ted Baldwin, who identified himself as a conservative Republican from Baton Rouge and a member of the Republican State Central Committee, the party's governing body, said that discrimination against gays in the public workplace is prevalent.

He said that many of his friends have been fired or have been discriminated against in other ways when their sexual identification was made known. Baldwin said all the gay community is seeking is a basic right to be free from discrimination and harassment in state jobs.

"This is not a Baptist right, this is not a Catholic right or rights secured by the Family Forum," he said. "These are inherent rights." The Family Forum is an organization that includes clergy members, who promote conservative causes.

Baldwin said that if an employee is doing the job then "this (bill) takes the personal life off the table."

Twenty-one states ban discrimination based on sexual orientation in both the public and private sector, said Kenny Tucker, chairman of the Forum for Equality, one of the organizations that pushed the bill. Four other states ban discrimination just in the public sector.

"This is over-reaching," said John Yeats, a lobbyist for the Baptist convention. "I ask you to defer this bill."